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Linguistics Assignment 1

This document is an introduction to linguistics submitted by Maheen Fatima for her class ENG-113. It provides an overview of 12 branches of linguistics: morphology, phonology, syntax, phonetics, semantics, grammar, pragmatics, linguistic typology, lexicon, neurolinguistics, computational linguistics, and psycholinguistics. Each branch is briefly defined. The document aims to provide a scientific understanding of language and how its various components are organized and function.
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0% found this document useful (0 votes)
399 views12 pages

Linguistics Assignment 1

This document is an introduction to linguistics submitted by Maheen Fatima for her class ENG-113. It provides an overview of 12 branches of linguistics: morphology, phonology, syntax, phonetics, semantics, grammar, pragmatics, linguistic typology, lexicon, neurolinguistics, computational linguistics, and psycholinguistics. Each branch is briefly defined. The document aims to provide a scientific understanding of language and how its various components are organized and function.
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Topic: Introduction to linguistics

Submitted by: Maheen Fatima

Submitted to: Miss Shazia Saleem

Roll # 23011502-058

Class: BS-English (A)

Course Code: ENG-113

Assignment # 1

Date: 07-11-2023

Content

1. Morphology
2. Phonology

3. Syntax

4. Phonetics

5. Semantics

6. Grammar

7. Pragmatics

8. Linguistic Typology

9. Lexicon

10.Neurolinguistics

11.Computational Linguistics

12. Psycholinguistics

Abstract
Linguistics is a word derived from Latin word lingua. It is the scientific study of language - how
it is put together and how it functions. Various building blocks of different types and sizes are
combined to make up a language. Sounds are brought together and sometimes when this
happens, they change their form and do interesting things. Words are arranged in a certain order,
and sometimes the beginnings and endings of the words are changed to adjust the meaning. Then
the meaning itself can be affected by the arrangement of words and by the knowledge of the
speaker about what the hearer will understand. Linguistics aim is to seek scientific understanding
of the place of language in human life. The ways in which it is organized to fulfill the needs. It
serves and the function to perform. It is called linguistics. It tries to describe and analyze any
language in general. There are various branches of linguistics which are given their own name
some of them are morphology, phonology, syntax, sematics, phonetics, pragmatics,
psycholinguistics, grammar and linguistic typology.

1. Morphology

Morphology, in linguistics, study of the internal construction of words. Languages vary widely in
the degree to which words can be analyzed into word elements, or morphemes (q.v.). In English
there are numerous examples, such as “replacement,” which is composed of re-, “place,” and -
ment, and “walked,” from the elements “walk” and -ed. Many American Indian languages have a
highly complex morphology; other languages, such as Vietnamese or Chinese, have very little or
none. Morphology includes the grammatical processes of inflection (q.v.) and derivation.
Inflection marks categories such as person, tense, and case; e.g., “sings” contains a final -
s, marker of the 3rd person singular, and the German Mannes consists of the stem Mann and the
genitive singular inflection -es. Derivation is the formation of new words from existing
words; e.g., “singer” from “sing” and “acceptable” from “accept.” Derived words can also be
inflected: “singers” from “singer.”

Morpheme, in linguistics, the smallest grammatical unit of speech; it may be a word, like “place”
or “an,” or an element of a word, like re- and -ed in “reappeared.” So-called isolating languages,
such as Vietnamese, have a one-to-one correspondence of morphemes to words; i.e., no words
contain more than one morpheme. Variants of a morpheme are called allomorphs; the ending -
s, indicating plural in “cats,” “dogs,” the -es in “dishes,” and the -en of “oxen” are all allomorphs
of the plural morpheme. The word “talked” is represented by two morphemes, “talk” and the
past-tense morpheme, here indicated by -ed. The study of words and morphemes is included
in morphology

2. Phonology
Phonology is the study of the patterns of sounds in a language and across languages. Put more
formally, phonology is the study of the categorical organization of speech sounds in languages;
how speech sounds are organized in the mind and used to convey meaning. In this section of the
website, we will describe the most common phonological processes and introduce the concepts
of underlying representations for sounds versus what is actually produced, the surface form.

Phonology can be related to many linguistic disciplines, including psycholinguistics, cognitive


science, sociolinguistics and language acquisition. Principles of phonology can also be applied to
treatments of speech pathologies and innovations in technology. In terms of speech recognition,
systems can be designed to translate spoken data into text. In this way, computers process the
language like our brains do. The same processes that occur in the mind of a human when
producing and receiving language occur in machines. One example of machines decoding
language is the popular intelligence system, Siri.

Phonology looks at many different things… Phonology looks at many different things…
 Why do related forms differ? Sane—Sanity. Electric—Electricity/ Atom—Atomic
 Phonology finds the systematic ways in which the forms differ and explains them
 What is stored in the mind?
o Phonology studies abstract mental entities, such as structures and processes. This
contrasts with phonetics, which deals with the actual production and acoustics of
the sounds of language.
 What sounds go together?
o Looks at what sounds/sound combinations are accepted and why.
 How are sounds organized into syllables?
o With the use of phonological trees syllables are broken up more easily. Syllables
are made up of a rhyme and an onset (any consonants before the rhyme). The
rhyme made up of a nucleus (the vowel sound(s) in the syllable, the key
component of all syllables) and a coda (any consonants following the nucleus).
 What are the differences between languages?
o For example, different languages can used different phonemes, or different
syllable structures (what sounds can go together to make sequences or words) and
phonology identifies these differences.

3. Syntax
 Not to be confused with syntax in programming, syntax in linguistics refers to
the arrangement of words and phrases. Syntax covers topics like word order and grammar
rules, such as subject-verb agreement or the correct placement of direct and indirect objects.
 Syntax is essential to understanding constituency, the term for multiple words acting as a
single unit. In long and complex sentences, constituency is necessary to determine the
hierarchy within the sentence, particularly with sentence diagramming.
 Just how important is syntax in English? Changing the placement of a word often changes
the meaning of the sentence. Sometimes the change is minor, useful for writers who like
nuance and subtext, but sometimes the change is more significant, giving the entire sentence
a whole new interpretation.
 To see for yourself, look at the syntax examples below. Notice how moving the
word only changes the meaning of the entire sentence. Keep in mind that only can be
an adjective or an adverb; adjectives modify the nouns that come after them, and adverbs
modify the verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs that come after them.
 Only Batman fights crime.
 Meaning: Batman is the only person who fights crime. No one except Batman fights crime,
not even Superman.
 Batman only fights crime.
 Meaning: Fighting crime is the only thing Batman does. He doesn’t work, he doesn’t shower
—fighting crime is all he does.
 Batman fights only crime.
Meaning: Batman doesn’t fight anything except crime. He doesn’t fight Alfred or Robin; he
doesn’t fight the dry cleaner if they accidentally stain his shirt. Crime is the only thing he fights.
Meaning: Batman doesn’t fight anything except crime. He doesn’t fight Alfred or Robin; he
doesn’t fight the dry cleaner if they accidentally stain his shirt. If you want to get technical with
the English language, there are dozens of rules about syntax you can study. However, these can
get confusing, and some require an expert understanding of English, so below we list only the
five basic rules of syntax in English, which are enough for constructing simple sentences
correctly.
1. All sentences require a subject and a verb. However, imperative sentences (commands) do
not need to include their subject because it’s assumed to be the person the sentence is
directed at.
2. A single sentence should include one main idea. If a sentence includes two or more ideas,
it’s best to break it up into multiple sentences.
3. The subject comes first, and the verb comes second. If the sentence has objects, they come
third, after the verb.
4. Subordinate clauses (dependent clauses) also require a subject and verb. Below we explain
more about how to use subordinate clauses in sentence structure.
5. Adjectives and adverbs go in front of the words they describe. If there are multiple adjectives
describing the same noun, use the proper adjective order, known as the “Royal Order.”
Learning these fundamentals is the first step in understanding syntax. After that, you’ll be able to
tackle more advanced topics, like the types of syntax.

4. Phonetics
Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds, or in
the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign.[1] Linguists who specialize in studying
the physical properties of speech are phoneticians. The field of phonetics is traditionally divided
into three sub-disciplines based on the research questions involved such as how humans plan and
execute movements to produce speech (articulatory phonetics), how various movements affect
the properties of the resulting sound (acoustic phonetics), or how humans convert sound waves
to linguistic information (auditory phonetics). Traditionally, the minimal linguistic unit of
phonetics is the phone—a speech sound in a language which differs from the phonological unit
of phoneme; the phoneme is an abstract categorization of phones, and it is also defined as the
smallest unit that discerns meaning between sounds in any given language.[2]
Phonetics deals with two aspects of human speech: production—the ways humans make sounds
—and perception—the way speech is understood. The communicative modality of a language
describes the method by which a language produces and perceives languages. Languages with
oral-aural modalities such as English produce speech orally (using the mouth) and perceive
speech aurally (using the ears). Sign languages, such as Australian Sign Language (Auslan) and
American Sign Language (ASL), have a manual-visual modality, producing speech manually
(using the hands) and perceiving speech visually (using the eyes). ASL and some other sign
languages have in addition a manual-manual dialect for use in tactile
signing by deafblind speakers where signs are produced with the hands and perceived with the
hands as well.
Language production consists of several interdependent processes which transform a non-
linguistic message into a spoken or signed linguistic signal. After identifying a message to be
linguistically encoded, a speaker must select the individual words—known as lexical items—to
represent that message in a process called lexical selection. During phonological encoding, the
mental representation of the words are assigned their phonological content as a sequence
of phonemes to be produced. The phonemes are specified for articulatory features which denote
particular goals such as closed lips or the tongue in a particular location. These phonemes are
then coordinated into a sequence of muscle commands that can be sent to the muscles, and when
these commands are executed properly the intended sounds are produced.
These movements disrupt and modify an airstream which results in a sound wave. The
modification is done by the articulators, with different places and manners of articulation
producing different acoustic results. For example, the words tack and sack both begin with
alveolar sounds in English, but differ in how far the tongue is from the alveolar ridge. This
difference has large effects on the air stream and thus the sound that is produced. Similarly, the
direction and source of the airstream can affect the sound. The most common airstream
mechanism is pulmonic—using the lungs—but the glottis and tongue can also be used to produce
airstreams.
Language perception is the process by which a linguistic signal is decoded and understood by a
listener. In order to perceive speech the continuous acoustic signal must be converted into
discrete linguistic units such as phonemes, morphemes, and words. In order to correctly identify
and categorize sounds, listeners prioritize certain aspects of the signal that can reliably
distinguish between linguistic categories. While certain cues are prioritized over others, many
aspects of the signal can contribute to perception. For example, though oral languages prioritize
acoustic information, the McGurk effect shows that visual information is used to distinguish
ambiguous information when the acoustic cues are unreliable.
Modern phonetics has three branches:
 Articulatory phonetics, which addresses the way sounds are made with the
articulators,
 Acoustic phonetics, which addresses the acoustic results of different articulations,
and
 Auditory phonetics, which addresses the way listeners perceive and understand
linguistic signals.

5. Semantics
Semantics is the study of the meaning of words and sentences. It uses the relations of linguistic
forms to non-linguistic concepts and mental representations to explain how sentences are
understood by native speakers.
Semantics can be broken down into the following three subcategories:
 Formal semantics is the study of grammatical meaning in natural language. In other
words, it intends to define the meaning of words and phrases based on its grammatical
structure.
 Conceptual semantics is the study of words at their core. It focuses on establishing
universal definitions for words before they are taken into context.
 Lexical semantics is the study of word meaning. It establishes meaning to words based on
their relationships to other words in the sentence as well as their compositional structure.
At its core, we think of semantics as the “magic” that happens when people communicate and,
most importantly, when they understand each other. This magic is actually a well-balanced
combination of:
 understanding words and phrases;
 having general knowledge;
 and using real-world experience.
For example, to make sense out of a work of art, you need to combine the objective
representation with your knowledge of the world. When you consider words in context, you can
understand the meaning and the message.
The role played by a word in expressing meaning is called the semantic role or thematic role.
Here are some common ones:
 Agent: The 'doer' of an action, like the cat in The cat scratched the sofa.
 Theme or Patient: The 'receiver' of the action, like the sofa in The cat scratched the
sofa.
 Experiencer: Someone or something that 'experiences' the situation, like the
child in The child saw the cat scratching the sofa.
 Instrument: Something that the agent uses to do something, like its paws in The cat
scratched the sofa with its paws.
 Recipient: Something or someone that receives something, like the cat in The child
gave the cat its food.
 Time: Surprisingly enough, that is the time when an action is done, such
as midnight in The cat scratch the sofa at midnight.

6. Grammar
In linguistics, the grammar of a natural language is its set of structural rules on speakers' or
writers' usage and creation of clauses, phrases, and words. The term can also refer to the study of
such rules, a subject that includes phonology, morphology, and syntax, together Grammar
with phonetics, semantics, and pragmatics. There are two different ways to study grammar right
now: traditional grammar and theoretical grammar.
Fluent speakers of a language variety or lect have internalised these rules. [1] the vast majority of
which – at least in the case of one's native language(s) – are acquired not by intentional study
or instruction but by hearing other speakers. Much of this internalisation occurs during early
childhood; learning a language later in life usually involves more direct instruction. [2]
The term "grammar" can also describe the linguistic behaviour of groups of speakers and writers
rather than individuals. Differences in scale are important to this meaning: for example, the term
"English grammar" could refer to the whole of English grammar (that is, to the grammar of all
the language's speakers) in which case it covers lots of variation.[3] At a smaller scale, it may
refer only to what is shared among the grammars of all or most English speakers (such
as subject–verb–object word order in simple sentences). At the smallest scale, this sense of
"grammar" can describe the conventions of just one form of English that is better defined than
others (such as standard English for a region).
A description, study, or analysis of such rules may also be known as a grammar, or as a grammar
book. A reference book describing the grammar of a language is called a "reference grammar" or
simply "a grammar" (see History of English grammars). A fully revealed grammar, which
describes the grammatical constructions of a particular speech type in great detail is called
descriptive grammar. This kind of linguistic description contrasts with linguistic prescription, a
plan to actively ban, or lessen the use of, some constructions while popularising and starting
others, either absolutely or about a standard variety. For example, some pedants insist that
sentences in English should not end with prepositions, a ban that has been traced to John
Dryden (1631–1700). His unjustified rejection of the practice may have led other English
speakers to avoid it and discourage its use. [4][5] Yet ending sentences with a preposition has a long
history in Germanic languages like English, where it is so widespread that it is the norm.
Outside linguistics, the word grammar often has a different meaning. It may be used more widely
to include rules of spelling and punctuation, which linguists would not typically consider as part
of grammar but rather of orthography, the conventions used for writing a language. It may also
be used more narrowly to refer to a set of prescriptive norms only, excluding the aspects of a
language's grammar which do not change or are clearly acceptable (or not) without the need for
discussions. Jeremy Butterfield claimed that, for non-linguists, "Grammar is often a generic way
of referring to any aspect of English that people object to".

7. Pragmatics
In linguistics and related fields, pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning.
The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the
relationship between the interpreter and the interpreted. [1] Linguists who specialize in pragmatics
are called pragmaticians. The field has been represented since 1986 by the International
Pragmatics Association (IPrA).
Pragmatics encompasses phenomena including implicature relevance and conversation, as well
as nonverbal communication. Theories of pragmatics go hand-in-hand with theories
of semantics, which studies aspects of meaning, and syntax which examines sentence structures,
principles, and relationships. The ability to understand another speaker's intended meaning is
called pragmatic competence.[3][4][5] In 1938, Charles Morris first distinguished pragmatics as an
independent subfield within semiotics, alongside syntax and semantics. [6] Pragmatics emerged as
its own subfield in the 1950s after the pioneering work of J.L. Austin and Paul Grice
Pragmatics was a reaction to structuralist linguistics as outlined by Ferdinand de Saussure. In
many cases, it expanded upon his idea that language has an analyzable structure, composed of
parts that can be defined in relation to others. Pragmatics first engaged only in synchronic study,
as opposed to examining the historical development of language. However, it rejected the notion
that all meaning comes from signs existing purely in the abstract space of langue.
Meanwhile, historical pragmatics has also come into being. The field did not gain linguists'
attention until the 1970s, when two different schools emerged: the Anglo-American pragmatic
thought and the European continental pragmatic thought (also called the perspective view.

8. Linguistic Typology
Linguistic Typology is the analysis, comparison, and classification of languages according to
their common structural features and forms. This is also called cross-linguistic typology.
"The branch of linguistics that "studies the structural similarities between languages, regardless
of their history, as part of an attempt to establish a satisfactory classification, or typology, of
languages" is known as typological linguistics (Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics, 2008).
Examples
"Typology is the study of linguistic systems and recurring patterns of linguistic systems.
Universals are typological generalizations based on these recurring patterns.
"Linguistic typology took off in its modern form with the ground-breaking research of Joseph
Greenberg, such as, for example, his seminal paper on a cross-linguistic survey of word
order leading to a series of implicational universals (Greenberg 1963). . . . Greenberg also
attempted to establish methods for quantifying typological studies, in order that linguistic
typology could meet scientific standards (cf. Greenberg 1960 [1954]). Furthermore, Greenberg
re-introduced the importance of studying the ways languages change, but with the emphasis that
language changes give us possible explanations for language universals (cf., for example,
Greenberg 1978).
"Since Greenberg's pioneering efforts linguistic typology has grown exponentially and is, as any
science, continuously being enhanced and redefined as to methods and approaches. The last few
decades have seen the compilation of large-scale databases with the help of ever more refined
technology, which have led to new insights as well as given rise to new methodological issues."

9. Lexicon
A lexicon (plural: lexicons, rarely lexica) is the vocabulary of a language or branch
of knowledge (such as nautical or medical). In linguistics, a lexicon is a language's inventory
of lexemes. The word lexicon derives from Greek word λεξικόν (lexikon), neuter of λεξικός
(lexikos) meaning 'of or for words'.
Linguistic theories generally regard human languages as consisting of two parts: a lexicon,
essentially a catalogue of a language's words (its wordstock); and a grammar, a system of rules
which allow for the combination of those words into meaningful sentences. The lexicon is also
thought to include bound morphemes, which cannot stand alone as words (such as most affixes).
In some analyses, compound words and certain classes of idiomatic expressions, collocations and
other phrases are also considered to be part of the lexicon. Dictionaries are lists of the lexicon, in
alphabetical order, of a given language; usually, however, bound morphemes are not included.
tems in the lexicon are called lexemes, lexical items, or word forms. Lexemes are not atomic
elements but contain both phonological and morphological components. When describing the
lexicon, a reductionist approach is used, trying to remain general while using a minimal
description. To describe the size of a lexicon, lexemes are grouped into lemmas. A lemma is a
group of lexemes generated by inflectional morphology. Lemmas are represented in dictionaries
by headwords that list the citation forms and any irregular forms, since these must be learned to
use the words correctly. Lexemes derived from a word by derivational morphology are
considered new lemmas. The lexicon is also organized according to open and closed
categories. Closed categories, such as determiners or pronouns, are rarely given new lexemes;
their function is primarily syntactic. Open categories, such as nouns and and verbs, have highly
active generation mechanisms and their lexemes are more semantic in nature.

10.Neurolinguistics
Neurolinguistics is the study of neural mechanisms in the human brain that control the
comprehension, production, and acquisition of language. As an interdisciplinary field,
neurolinguistics draws methods and theories from fields such
as neuroscience, linguistics, cognitive science, communication disorders and neuropsychology.
Researchers are drawn to the field from a variety of backgrounds, bringing along a variety of
experimental techniques as well as widely varying theoretical perspectives. Much work in
neurolinguistics is informed by models in psycholinguistics and theoretical linguistics, and is
focused on investigating how the brain can implement the processes that theoretical and
psycholinguistics propose are necessary in producing and comprehending language.
Neurolinguists study the physiological mechanisms by which the brain processes information
related to language, and evaluate linguistic and psycholinguistic theories,
using aphasiology, brain imaging, electrophysiology, and computer modeling

11. Computational linguistics


Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field concerned with the computational
modelling of natural language, as well as the study of appropriate computational approaches to
linguistic questions. In general, computational linguistics draws upon linguistics, computer
science, artificial intelligence, mathematics, logic, philosophy, cognitive science, cognitive
psychology, psycholinguistics, anthropology and neuroscience, among others.
Since the 2020s, computational linguistics has become a near-synonym of either natural
language processing or language technology, with deep learning approaches, such as large
language models, outperforming the specific approaches previously used in the field
The field overlapped with artificial intelligence since the efforts in the United States in the 1950s
to use computers to automatically translate texts from foreign languages, particularly Russian
scientific journals, into English.[1] Since rule-based approaches were able to
make arithmetic (systematic) calculations much faster and more accurately than humans, it was
expected that lexicon, morphology, syntax and semantics can be learned using explicit rules, as
well. After the failure of rule-based approaches, David Hays[2] coined the term in order to
distinguish the field from AI and co-founded both the Association for Computational Linguistics
(ACL) and the International Committee on Computational Linguistics (ICCL) in the 1970s and
1980s. What started as an effort to translate between languages evolved into a much wider field
of natural language processing.

12. Psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics, the study of psychological aspects of language. Experiments investigating
such topics as short-term and long-term memory, perceptual strategies, and speech perception
based on linguistic models are part of this discipline. Most work in psycholinguistics has been
done on the learning of language by children. Language is extremely complex, yet children learn
it quickly and with ease; thus, the study of child language is important for psychologists
interested in cognition and learning and for linguists concerned with the insights it can give
about the structure of language. In the 1960s and early ’70s much research in child language
used the transformational-generative model proposed by the American linguist Noam Chomsky;
the goal of that research has been to discover how children come to know the grammatical
processes that underlie the speech they hear. The transformational model has also been adapted
for another field of psycholinguistics, the processing and comprehension of speech; early
experiments in this area suggested, for example, that passive sentences took longer to process
than their active counterparts because an extra grammatical rule was necessary to produce the
passive sentence. Many of the results of this work were controversial and inconclusive, and
psycholinguistics has been turning increasingly to other functionally related and socially oriented
models of language struct
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 Liddell, Henry George; Scott, Robert; A Greek–English Lexicon at the Perseus Project.
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(compare Dell & Reich (1981) and Motley, Camden & Baars (1982)). For ease of
description, the language production process is described as a series of independent stages,
though recent evidence shows this is inaccurate. [12] For further descriptions of interactive
activation models see Jaeger, Furth & Hilliard (2012).
 Mey, J.L. (2006). "Pragmatics: Overview". Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics. pp. 51–
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 Rundle, Bede. Grammar in Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford
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